Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [11]
A tree being only a small part of a picture, and of nature, he concluded that he would count himself successful if after eight or ten years he could paint “tolerably.” And ultimately, following the example of West, he wished to excel in “history painting,” the depiction of dramatic scriptural, historical, or mythological scenes. Such works were generally held to be the highest form of the art: “as epic poetry excels all other kinds of poetry, because it addresses itself to the sublimer feelings of our nature, so does historical painting stand preëminent in our art, because it calls forth the same feelings.”
Finley was not daunted by these long-term demands on his energy, intellect, and skill. On the contrary, they deepened his growing sense of consecration, that he now and for the future had a calling: “My passion for my art is so firmly rooted that I am confident no human power could destroy it.”
Finley took time off from his easel to relax and to get around London. When in his quarters his main amusements were music and smoking. His father liked to sing, and before being ordained had even taught a singing school. Finley now got a pianoforte, and apparently learned to play it; he entertained fellow artists at his rooms, one of them said, with “Novels Coffee and Musick by Morse.” He had smuggled a supply of American cigars into England, stuffing some in his pockets and hat, and another hundred or so in his trunk. He slipped the contraband past a good-natured customs officer by giving him a few dozen “for his kindness.” Allston was a great smoker, too, the mantel in his painting room fringed with cigar stubs. For Finley, puffing an evening cigar with Allston meant knowing bliss, “that if there was ever a happy being in the world, I was that person.”
Once settled in London, Finley saw the sights. He took in Vauxhall, the crown jewels, the races at Epsom, and the annual St. Bartholomew’s Fair, with its slack-wire dancers, pickpockets, and deafening confusion of fiddles and drums. In front of St. James’s Palace he got his first glimpse of royalty—the heavy-drinking Prince of Wales, “very red and considerably bloated.” Over time he ventured into the countryside to shoot target practice against a tree, and visited Oxford, the cliffs of Dover, Stratford-upon-Avon. He discovered that in London, as in America, his father was known “pretty extensively.” People who learned that he was an American named Morse often asked if he was related to Jedediah.
Through Allston and West, and on his own, Finley gained some entry into London’s intellectual and literary society. He got to meet the liberal reformer William Wilberforce, the poet Samuel Rogers, and the essayist Charles Lamb. He was especially impressed by Allston’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lecturing in London on Shakespeare and Milton but in ill health and struggling against his opium addiction. Coleridge visited Finley and Leslie in their rooms, where they reportedly tried to relieve his melancholy by drawing him out on aesthetic and metaphysical questions. It also “much pleased” Finley to befriend the colorful American playwright-actor John Howard Payne, said to be the bastard of Tom Paine. Just Finley’s age, Payne had created a sensation as a boy actor in New York. In Boston he became the first American to act Hamlet, playing opposite the Ophelia of Elizabeth Poe—three months after she had given birth to the later-famous son she named Edgar.
Finley became an ardent theatergoer himself. A rebuilt Covent Garden had opened in 1809, one of the largest theaters in Europe, holding nearly three thousand spectators. Finley went often to enjoy “the best acting in the world,” he said, especially the